an experiment in food and life.

Tag Archives: honey

Have you ever noticed that you can’t buy a small amount of carrots? Even baby carrots come in bags of 100 or so. It’s annoying, because usually a recipe only calls for a single carrot, and sometimes you can buy a single carrot, but usually you can’t and so to make one small pot of chicken stock you buy a pound of carrots and then you have all these carrots and it’s carrot madness!

Some people really like carrots. I don’t really like them very much, so when I have an excess I like to think of ways I can make them tastier or just hide them from myself in whatever I’m cooking.

A friend of mine made honey glazed carrots for Thanksgiving this past year and they were so good! I found myself thinking…hey, maybe I do like carrots. I don’t. But, if I like these then you can bet that they’re good. The recipe is simple and easy (and sugar free.)

1 lb carrots (peeled and chopped regular carrots or you can just use baby carrots)

2 tbsp butter

3 tbsp honey

1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Salt and fresh ground pepper

My photos are a little funky because I’m using my new Camera+ iPhone app and don’t really know how to exercise its full potential yet.

Okay, so, first prepare a large pot of boiling water with salt. When the water reaches a rolling boil, add in your carrots and let them boil for about 6 minutes or until they’re tender. Then you drain the carrots and add them back to the pot with the heat still on about medium. Mix in the butter, honey and lemon juice. Stir and cook the carrots for another 5 minutes. Then add fresh ground black pepper and serve. How easy was that? It makes about 4 servings and if you’re doing Weight Watchers each serving is 3 points. Enjoy! And enjoy this weird picture of what may be carrots.

I know what you’re thinking. Okay, I don’t, but something you might be thinking is that the combination of vegan and sugar-free automatically means tasteless and dry. Sometimes, that is the case, but this is not one of those times.

If you’ve been reading my blog consistently you know I’m trying to eliminate refined sugar from my diet completely. So far, it’s been successful and pretty easy. This bread is great because I think that substituting honey for white sugar actually adds to the flavor and helps to make it more moist and scrumptious. I got the recipes from Allrecipes.com but adapted it a little to be sugar free. Also I didn’t add the raisins or walnuts because I hate both those things, but feel free to ignore my choices and add them if you choose.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup margarine (the recipe calls for butter but we had margarine left over from something else and I actually find that margarine works just as well as butter in terms of baking. Also, using margarine makes the bread vegan, which is cool if you’re a vegan or if your friends are.)

3/4 cup honey (Okay, some vegans say honey isn’t vegan because it’s produced by bees, so you could use maple syrup instead if you want to. Trees don’t have feelings.)

1 cup chilled, sugar-free applesauce

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp allspice (this is an addition of mine, the spicier the better!)

1/4 tsp ground cloves

And that’s it.

First, preheat your oven to 350. Then cream the honey and the margarine.

Add the applesauce and mix it in. Then add the flour and the rest of the dry ingredients and blend. The mixture won’t be quite as gloopy as your average bread, and you can add a little more applesauce if you want it to be thinner. It actually turns out pretty thick and fluffy. Grease and flour a bread pan and then bake the bread for about 40 minutes, or until you can stick a toothpick in it and it comes out clean. That’s it! My blog is being weird, so I can’t post any more pictures, but you get it. T his cake makes an excellent breakfast. Buen provecho!